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I Kill, Therefore I Am: War and Killing As Structures of Human Spirit

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I Kill, Therefore I Am: War and Killing As Structures of Human Spirit Article I Kill, Therefore I Am: War and Killing as Structures of Human Spirit Stefan Sonderling University of South Africa Department of Communication Science [email protected] Abstract This article uncovers the function of war and killing as the primary and primordial formative structure of human spirituality and religious experience. Tracing the representations of war in texts of philosophers and social thinkers from ancient Greece to the present, reveals a tradition of thought that considers war as the defining characteristic of humanity and as the foundation for constructing human and divine identities. While war is a social and collective activity, at its core are the actions of fighting and killing that are forms of interpersonal engagement. It is this interpersonal engagement that many thinkers imagine as being the source of human consciousness, identity and meaning; as Heraclitus put it: war creates both men and gods, making mortals immortal and immortals mortal. Keywords: Heraclitus; Aristotle; Nietzsche; war; polemos; Hegel; immortals; killing; consciousness; noble-savage Introduction: Towards a New Perspective on War or Rediscovery of Old Tradition To speak of the “origin” of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death for “recognition.” Without this fight to the death for pure prestige, there would never have been human beings on earth. (Kojève 1980, 11–12) This, O Muslim brothers, is who we are; we slay for our God, our God demands the slaying. I kill; therefore I am. (Murawiec 2008, 9) For contemporary scholars war and killing are assumed as universally traumatic experiences, presumed as manifestations of the inhuman and deviation from what is assumed as the characteristic of a normal human being. However, such assumptions are the product of a social process for constructing meaning. The assumption that war can only be destructive and traumatic emerged after the First World War and was elaborated on since the Vietnam War. Phronimon https://doi.org/10.25159/2413-3086/1951 https://upjournals.co.za/index.php/Phronimon Online ISSN 2413-3086 Volume 19 |2018 | #1951 | 17 pages © The Author(s) Published by Unisa Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) However, such assumptions only see war as a negative and destructive activity and ignore an older Western tradition of thought that considers war as a positive force, and selective acts of killing as rites of passage enabling the warrior to construct a sense of spiritual identity (Bourke 1999; Lomsky-Feder 2004, 83–84). Ever since the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, identified war as the father of all things, almost all philosophers in every age and culture affirmed war as a generative force and a meaningful human activity. War is the central theme for the ancient Greek poets, Homer and Hesiod, while the first historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, considered war as a way of life and recorded its occurrences in great details (Havelock 1972, 21). For modern thinkers, from Machiavelli through to Hobbes and Hegel, the reality of war is a subject for philosophical thought. Such affirmation is expressed by Nietzsche’s (1968, 33) statement that life is the consequence of war, and society is a means to war. In the twentieth century Emmanuel Levinas (1991, 23) contends that war is human reality and ultimately the human being manifests himself in war. In the twenty-first century a journalist, Chris Hedges (2003, 3–7), rediscovers that war remains a force that gives us meaning when peace has emptied all meaning from life in the postmodern world (Fukuyama 1992, 328–331; Gray 2003, 85; Hammond 2007, 11; Sonderling 2012). Beyond the Myth of the Noble Savage Most contemporary thinkers assume that the human being is characterised by a peaceful disposition for cooperation, empathy and understanding others, while violence and war are presumed as pathological manifestations of the inhuman. Underlying this view is the idea that human beings are a distinct species far removed from nature and the animal world. Humans are assumed as superior beings whose existence is imagined as a disembodied spirit alienated from animal corporality (Sheets-Johnstone 2007, 340). If the earthly origin of the human being must be acknowledged, it is assumed that man is a descendant of a primordial peaceful noble savage that was a friend of all and enemy of none, as imagined by J-J. Rousseau. From this perspective war and strife are pathologies resulting from the corrupting influence of civilisation. But this view confirms the pacifists’ self-delusion for whom “it is far more comforting to claim decent from imaginary pacifists who live in our dreams of prehistoric peace” (Bigelow 1969, 156). Despite the fact that humanity is not removed from nature, the belief in human superiority persists (Gribbin and Gribbin 1998, 1) and the presumed peacefulness of human pre-history is the prevailing politically-correct orthodoxy enshrined in international declarations and legislated as if the scientific truth (Keeley 1997; Pinker 2003, 336). Against the pacifists, Hobbes contends that the original state of nature was a perpetual “war of every one against every one” and life was solitary, brutal and short (Hobbes 1958, 110). Paradoxically, Hobbes attributes this brutal state of nature to a divine origin being the “art whereby God has made and governs the world” (Hobbes 1958, 23). While human life in Hobbes’s divine state of nature was brutal, it was never solitary because human beings are by nature political animals, as noted by Aristotle (1964, 28). For Hobbes the permanent warfare is the result of primitive democratic equality: the ability of each man to kill. Presumably equal ability to kill transformed primordial human beings into constitutional lawyers who 2 signed a social contract to establish ordered social structure to avert the violent humanly created and divinely ordained chaos. Considerations of war and violence are largely absent from the images of man in the discourses of Western science and philosophy. There are two dominant images claiming to represent the primary essence of human nature: Man as a Homo Sapiens, which is the image of a disembodied spiritual solitary thinking individual who affirms his humanity by declaring, a la Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.” The other image presents the human being as a Homo Faber: man as the toolmaker and a proud craftsman or the manufacturer of goods motivated by rational economic calculation. An extension of the economic image is the Homo Laborans: man as the soulless labourer of the capitalist economy (Agamben 1998, 3). From this perspective man is defined by his labour and work and proclaims his humanity by declaring: “I labour, therefore I am.” It is possible to propose an alternative to both the idealist and materialist conceptions of man: the disembodied thinking Homo sapiens and the labouring homo faber, a new realist image of man as a warrior: the homo polemos. As Bigelow (1969, 43) suggests, man should not be “defined as the toolmaker, but rather as the war maker.” Thus the ancient warrior, and the modern day warriors such as founders of nations, gangsters, radical Christians, Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists, become human beings by proclaiming: “I kill, therefore I am” (Murawiec 2008, 9). The Primacy of War in Human Existence The image of the human warrior claims primacy over the two traditional images of man, because thinking and production are not primary characteristics of man. As Aristotle (1964, 32) contends: “Life is action not production.” In other words, the human condition is characterised by three fundamental human spheres of labour, work and action. Action has a primacy because it is the only activity that goes on directly between men without mediation by things or matter (Arendt 1998, 7). Ultimately human action is the foundation for work and human thought. What is the nature of human action? Huizinga (1971, 19–21) proposes that the action of play is the foundation for civilisation (Huizinga 1971, 23). However, play is a manifestation of a more primary activity of contestation (or agon). Play and fighting form a single and indivisible field of human action (Huizinga 1971, 60–61, 95, 110), thus even when play is deadly it still remains play (Huizinga 1971, 61, 69). Such unity is expressed in most languages; “ever since words existed for fighting and playing, men have been wont to call war a game” (Huizinga 1971, 110). War as play is coeval with speech, as recorded in Homer’s characterisation of Achilles as the “doer of great deeds and the speaker of great words” (Arendt 1998, 25). However, the act of fighting has primacy over speech because it provides the theme for the wordsmith to immortalise in words. War is the foundation of social life because it brings people into a military unit that ultimately becomes a political community: it is as if war makes society and society makes war (Tilly 1975). Marx (1972, 115–116) considers war for conquest of territory as the driving 3 force of history and the foundation for division of labour and social hierarchy. For the ancient Greeks labour can be synonymous with the noble work of fighting and killing—whether in war or hunting—performed by the aristocratic master, and differentiated from the mundane labour of slaves. In the ancient world and in primitive societies a nobleman was defined by the ability to use leisure, and in turn war is the ultimate leisure expressing freedom, while slaves and women were tasked with cooking and agricultural production (Davie 2003, 25). Moreover, the life and work of the slave is entirely dependent on the master nobleman’s action of fighting.
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